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Robinhood, in Need of Cash, Raises $1B from Its Investors
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"To continue operating, it drew on a line of credit from six banks amounting to between $500 million and $600 million to meet higher margin, or lending, requirements from its central clearing facility for stock trades, known as the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation."Non-zero chance had they not haulted trading on those symbols they would've been insolvent by close of trading today, depending on the size of their credit line.I watched the CEO on CNN tonight, and while I found him pretty difficult to watch, this is a very difficult position to be in. If you admit on TV that your company is experiencing liquidity issues -- even if temporary in nature such as with clearing custodianship requirements -- you run the risk of triggering a greater panic through customer withdrawals/redemptions.This could turn into a run on the brokerage pretty quickly, and probably already has in some measure, especially after a day of massively lost customer trust. He certainly didn't help it by going on TV and lying about their liquidity issues. They probably would've been better off by issuing a statement and keeping him off TV.
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Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust
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The OP mentions in passing that Brendan Eich "was solidly on team Rust" prior to leaving Mozilla, but adds no further details to that intriguing statement. Wouldn't that make Eich the Most Unrecognized Contributor? I don't think his name would be on any commit repo, after all.
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Linux Rust Support
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So, as a self-taught programmer looking for future job prospects... is this a signal to learn rust?
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There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada
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For just a bit of context/anecdata, I'm talking to my brother who lives in Vancouver and he wasn't even aware this was a problem. The road closure[0] on hwy 1 near Abbotsford/Chilliwack is a good one hour drive away from Vancouver core[1]. So while it sounds noteworthy for an entire city be technically flooded in, unless you were driving to the boonies, you're probably not actually impacted in any meaningful way.He also mentioned the weather cleared since yesterday, so floods should start to subside. You can follow the updates here[2][0] https://www.drivebc.ca/mobile/pub/events/id/DBC-35180.html[1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Vancouver,+BC,+Canada/Abbots...[2] https://www.drivebc.ca/#listView
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I must announce the immediate end of service of SSLPing
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This project was killed by invisible complexity. I felt a little sad
reading about it. There are lots of comments talking about the
sustainability of projects with respect to money and burnout, the need
to pay for services etc. I get that and agree. But I also get the
impression that wouldn't have helped here.When we reach a situation where some unknown person pushes an upstream
update, which causes a cascade of problems that even someone with deep
technical knowledge and daily connection to the project cannot unpick,
that's a breakdown in modularity/dependency.It's what we faced in the 1990s and from it evolved package managers,
version control, dependency management and all the good things.I think in 2022 we're back in a similar situation again.
Virtualisation, containers, cloud services and whatnot have regressed
development reliability.I predict the day when a really major service provider comes out and
says; "Sorry everyone. It's been 10 days downtime. We've put our 1000
top engineers on the problem and nobody knows what's wrong. We just
can't fix it."
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A Great Response to a Cease and Desist Letter
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This reminds me about how important it is to have a solid lawyer, and an understanding of the legal ecosystem. Even in cases like this with typos, "respond in ten (10) days" can be quite intimidating, especially when there's a money/legal power asymmetry.In one such case, Monster Cable issued a C&D to a much smaller, Blue Jeans Cable. The founder actually worked in litigation for 19 years and I found this portion of his response informative:I have seen Monster Cable take untenable IP positions in various different scenarios in the past, and am generally familiar with what seems to be Monster Cable's modus operandi in these matters. I therefore think that it is important that, before closing, I make you aware of a few points.After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not.There are several obvious points to be made here, but there's a subtle one, too. These hit-and-run settlements depend fundamentally on the compliance of isolated companies. If a larger organization asserts control over a smaller one (like the township-->$3.17 website, here, or on a larger scale Monster-->Blue Jeans), it often does make "economic sense" to settle.It's almost a negative version of the Tragedy of the Commons / Public Goods Dilemma. If every small company stood up and said "no, we will not settle" then there would be far less incentive to pursue bogus infringement claims. On the other hand, it always, locally, makes sense not to challenge claims and let some other small company deal with it.This brings me to one broader point, and that's the idea of standing for something on principle. I don't mean this in the sense of "be a moral person", but in the sense of larger organizations assuming (often correctly) that the short-term economic sense of individual actors will outweigh any principled objections they hold to the circumstances imposed by the power asymmetry. Cultivation of principles which favor the latter instead of the former course of action might be a good solution to the public goods dilemma outside of a difficult to ensure coordination of action.It's worth thinking about this in the context of Google and its recent stance against an entity with an enormous amount of legal power.http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/blue-jeans-str...
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Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years
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This is a disgrace. They send a young man to prison for 35 years for uncovering possible war crimes and a bunch of diplomatic fiddle-faddle.He is not eligible for parole until he has served 1/3 of the time.
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Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Than to Charity
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Frankly, I'd rather he leave it to Bill Gates.Going to Mars may be sexy, but stomping out Polio makes millions of lives better.Its hard to realize that, I suppose, when your life is in the bubble of a limo. That's honestly what makes Bill Gates second act so amazing.
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How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
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And congratulations, you have likely just "exceeded authorized access" and committed a felony violation of the CFAA punishable by a fine or imprisonment for not more than 5 years under 18 U.S.C. § 1030(c)(2)(B)(i).From the ABA: "Exceeds authorized access is defined in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to mean "to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter."To prove you have committed this terrible felony, the FBI will now demand that Apple assist in disabling the secure enclave of your device in order to access your browser history. But remember, they only need to do this because they aren't allow to MITM all TLS and "acquire" -- not "collect" -- every HTTP request your machine ever makes.
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Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars
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As a recently new customer to AWS. This service sounds really useful.Quite possibly one of the best pricing pages[1] I've seen in a while too.[1] https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx
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How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
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I know how to handle these dumb fucks. (I had a Mortgage with them, that makes me an expert)I had a problem with them coughing up an escrow refund check, although there is much more to the story that would have most of you boiling.I filed complaints with a total of 3 agencies and received my check via FedEx Priority overnight not long after. Suck it, BofA.* Filed complaint with CFPB
* Filed with Texas State Attorney General's Office (Insert your state here)
* Filed complaint with Office of the Comptroller of Currency (HelpWithMyBank.gov)Trust me. If you file a very well articulated complaint to each of these entities, they will feel the heat and resolve it.I hope this information helps you alienchow, and many others.
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RSS: there's nothing better
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so whats a good rss reader in 2017?
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Linux page table isolation is not needed on AMD processors
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At the meta level this is just a special case of "complexity is evil" in security. CPUs have been getting more and more complex, and the relationship between complexity and bugs (of all types) is exponential. Each new CPU feature exponentially increases the likelihood of errata.A major underlying cause is that we're doing things in hardware that ought to be done in software. We really need to stop shipping software as native blobs and start shipping it as pseudocode, allowing the OS to manage native execution. This would allow the kernel and OS to do tons and tons of stuff the CPU currently does: process isolation, virtualization, much or perhaps even all address remapping, handling virtual memory, etc. CPUs could just present a flat 64-bit address space and run code in it.These chips would be faster, simpler, cheaper, and more power efficient. It would also make CPU architectures easier to change. Going from x64 to ARM or RISC-V would be a matter of porting the kernel and core OS only.Unfortunately nobody's ever really gone there. The major problem with Java and .NET is that they try to do way too much at once and solve too many problems in one layer. They're also too far abstracted from the hardware, imposing an "impedance mismatch" performance penalty. (Though this penalty is minimal for most apps.)What we need is a binary format with a thin (not overly abstracted) pseudocode that closely models the processor. OSes could lazily compile these binaries and cache them, eliminating JIT program launch overhead except on first launch or code change. If the pseudocode contained rich vectorization instructions, etc., then there would not be much if any performance cost. In fact performance might be better since the lazy AOT compiler could apply CPU model specific optimizations and always use the latest CPU features for all programs.Instead we've bloated the processor to keep supporting 1970s operating systems and program delivery paradigms.It's such an obvious thing I'm really surprised nobody's done it. Maybe there's a perverse hardware platform lock-in incentive at work.
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Pyre: Fast Type Checking for Python
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It's interesting how static type systems are slowly gaining more adoption now by being bolted on to popular dynamic languages. It feels like a weird approach compared to using a language that was designed from the ground up to have a strong static type system but it's practical in terms of easing people into it.
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Gnome has moved to GitLab
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… and closed about a bazillion bugs I filed over the years in the process without (apparently) migrating them, too.… though I am pretty sure they left the bugs in the source intact.
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Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
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Perhaps we should start doing something like what Taiwan did with their trash: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/> The trucks only accept trash bags officially sanctioned by the government of Taiwan which come in a distinctive blue color, complete with an official seal. The bags range in price and size, from 3 liters to 120 liters. The most popular bag is 25 liters (similar to a tiny bathroom wastebasket liner), which costs about $5 for a pack of 20. This effectively makes a pay-as-you-waste model, incentivizing citizens to recycle and compost as much as possible since those services are offered for free. The musical garbage trucks are tailed by a recycling truck, where workers help the residents sort their recyclables and compost into thirteen distinct bins. Should people fail to sort their materials properly, the government will fine them up to $200.
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Show HN: Fully-automatic image background removal tool
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Hey HN! We originally built this as part of a bigger app but since removing backgrounds of images can be a tiresome task in itself we thought why not release it as a standalone tool? Feedback appreciated!
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Startup Playbook (2015)
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I just re-read this for the first time in years--it needs a re-write. I will try!But first this has inspired me to get to work on the forgotten Part II.
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Google’s also peddling a data collector through Apple’s back door
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This is Google not only intercepting people's smartphone traffic, but a lot more:- Google will send you a router to intercept your entire household's internet traffic on all devices with a browser (https://support.google.com/audiencemeasurement/answer/757439...)- Google will send you a device that listens 24/7 to audio in the room to figure out what you are watching on TV and listening to (https://support.google.com/audiencemeasurement/answer/757476...)- Google's project includes tracking of desktop and laptop internet activity via a browser extension that can basically read literally anything you do online (https://support.google.com/audiencemeasurement/answer/757448...)This isn't just trying to figure out what new up-and-coming apps are going to be the next big thing, this is Google building out very far-reaching profiles of your entire household, in return for some gift cards. This is signing away your family's entire digital life (and a significant part of anyone they interact with in a browser).
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“I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
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Btw, the new "fix" for the MCAS has just been announced and discussed by a 40-year experienced pilot [1]. Turns out that while we shouldn't be doing armchair analysis and assuming the worst of the engineering, management and executive team; the software fix released appears to be rather elementary and MCAS should have been designed with these safety checks in the first place. Why it wasn't is a huge concern and we wonder what other systems are at risk.In summary, the software fix does the following:1. Use inputs from both AOA sensors, if they disagree by 5.5 degrees, disable MCAS. Original MCAS system used only 1 AOA sensor and switched back and forth between the two after every flight.2. Triple redundant filters, A) Average value reasonability filter B) Catastrophic failure low-to-high transition filter C) Left vs. Right AOA deviation filter3. Limiting MCAS stab trim so that the elevator always can provide 1.2g of nose-up pitch authority for recovery. Furthermore, electric trim with the yoke switch will override MCAS.Turns out that armchair analysis was sort of on point and goes along with the incompetency at Boeing affirmed in this reddit post - sometimes, I wonder how we, humans, collectively build extraordinary monuments while we individually rest on stilts.[1] https://youtu.be/zGM0V7zEKEQ?t=370
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LightSail 2 Spacecraft Successfully Demonstrates Flight by Light
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Very cool! I know nothing about solar sails, but I wonder if the craft could have LEDs mounted to it so it could bombard different regions of the sail with photons to make it turn appropriately.
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Show HN: CLI tool for saving web pages as a single file
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One thing I always wonder when I see native software posted here:How do you guys handle the security aspect of executing stuff like this on your machines?Skimming the repo it has about a thousand lines of code and a bunch of dependencies with hundreds of sub-dependencies. Do you read all that code and evaluate the reputation of all dependencies?Do you execute it in a sandboxed environment?Do you just hope for the best like in the good old times of the C64?
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Lesser Known Coding Fonts
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Every thread about programming fonts is not complete without mentioning the wonderful website https://app.programmingfonts.org (no affiliation, I just find it really useful) which lists all the free programming-related fonts with live preview (for example every single font from the article, and every one mentioned so far in every comment in this thread is already there in the app) - it allows quick one-click preview with custom text on each font, and has direct links for downloading said fonts.Every font from this thread is already there in the app so you might as well just try them all.
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More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities
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So Intel failed to mitigate the vulnerability when it was first reported. Then they extended the embargo from May until November.And they still didn't fix it.What's going on with Intel?
Like they're going all in with lying in benchmarks against AMD and straight up forgetting what has been reported as security issues.
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Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players
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While I can understand Lee Se-dol's frustration, I think there are better lessons to learn from Kasparov's acceptance after the Deep Blue vs Kasparov matches.Cyborg chess is the future of chess. Period. Chess players use computers to train themselves and explore openings in human-only settings, while programmers / cyborgs play correspondence chess.Go is not finished as a game. A new tool, MCTS + Neural nets, has been developed to explore the "truth" behind the game at ever increasing rates. Its not about how to beat the tool, the question is how to best utilize the tool to improve self-play and self-learning in the game of Go.Or alternatively: how to best use the tool to play ever more perfect games of Go.-----------Come on, none of us are really "human" anymore since the advent of cell phones. We all use our cyborg-capabilities to search the internet and fact-check ourselves every day. Programmers use stack-overflow to teach themselves programming and remember obscure details (using our cyborg capabilities to tag, search, and sift through information ever faster and faster).Go is the same thing, except we only learned how to become cyborgs two years ago.----------Give the world-champions each a copy of AlphaGo on equal computers. Have them play Go against each other WITH computer assistance. I guarantee you that a more beautiful and perfect game will result. Let us welcome the age of Cyborg Go as we step into the future, we shouldn't be scared of it. We've become cyborgs in many other tasks, and Go is no different.
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Bose QC 35 Firmware 4.5.2 Noise Cancellation Investigation Report
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They are showing so much respect and care for their customers that is almost unbelievable.Kudos to their will to analyze and also document about a single problem so thoroughly.I never bought a Bose product before, but reading this honestly makes me think about it...If any company would cost a premium for being as careful as they are, I would definitely pay for it.
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Amazon Sends ‘Vote No’ Instructions to Unionizing Employees
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Call me crazy but I think the employer should get to make their case too.
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Plasma Bigscreen
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I realize "Plasma" is the name of the KDE presentation layer across all platforms, but it's mildly awkward to see in this context considering plasma TVs have only been a dead technology for six years or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_display
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Apple to move 40-45% iPhone production to India
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iPhone made in China is no better than the cotton from Xinjiang.Earlier the reports are workers in the China iPhone factory had a protest and brutal conflict with the local police. Reasons varied from unbearable working condition, the zero-covid policy, and being deceived about the compensation. After the local police oppressed the campaign, the government assigned headcounts to local villages, demanding them to fill in the factory slots. No wonder Apple loves China so much.Apple and many westerners never understand the risk and the ethics implication of doing business in China. Apple has utilized the cheap labor at a level where can never be possible in the civilized world, as well as making great profit out of the upper class of China, who directly benefits from the oppression system of CCP or part of the party themselves. It turns out that in spite of all values that Apple promotes, it actually cares about nothing but the profit and its comfortable zone in China.And I will not be surprised Apple will cease the plan in India as soon as China steps back from the zero-covid policy, as if all the blood has not been spilled.
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Scientists have discovered the first virovore – an organism that eats viruses
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Fascinating. It seems sensible (to a layman) that something would eat viruses but how would we construct tests (not trolling) to determine:1. if the Halteria were not eating something_else, and that something_else was infected by the viruses?2. if the Halteria themselves were not infected by the viruses?3. are the Halteria trying to ingest the viruses, or are they just ingesting lots_of_things in the petri dish?This observation seems interesting, assuming all other variables were constant and there was not some other interplay between the chlorovirus and other microbes which indirectly helped the Halteria grow:>Halteria deprived of the chlorovirus, meanwhile, wasn’t growing at all.Finally if the Halteria can ingest it and yet not be 'infected' by it then that seems awfully interesting as well.
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How to store your app's entire state in the url
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App state in URL can be a good idea, but if possible I prefer readable path/query parameters instead of unreadable base64 encoding.As one comparison, this is Google Finance encoding stock chart parameters: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/F:NYSE?window=5Y
Versus Yahoo! Finance doing the same: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/chart?p=F#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--
In both examples, the only custom parameter is setting the time window to 5 years.
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LK-99: Team of Southeast University observed zero resistance below 110 K
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To me this is encouraging. 110K is really high! It's higher than YBCO which is what they make commercial "high temperature" superconducting tape out of. IMO if this is legit (I have no way of judging the source) then this is the first good third party evidence that the original researchers are not just doing some kind of fraud. A total fraud wouldn't have actually discovered a novel high-temperature, but not room temperature, superconductor.At worst it seems to me like they discovered a cool new superconductor that may have commercial applications. At best, they may have a variant of this material that really is a room temperature superconductor. Either way, there is an important scientific discovery here.I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting. Maybe the source isn't actually credible? Any Chinese speakers here know?
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About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
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As a musician once on there, I joined, spent a lot of time carefully designing my page and uploading my catalogue, and then I paid $20 a month for their premium service for absolutely no traction on the site beyond external promotion I did.The UI on BandCamp has been vastly outdated for ages now, it was very hard to navigate and find new music by genre. i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link.It's a pre-soundcloud site, and even soundcloud (with a superior UI) was going broke years ago. I was unaware they had a staff of developers, I envision most of them were on the bench most of the time.Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone.Music platforms should be heavily promoting any independent artist that pays them a monthly fee... They seem to think that monthly subscription money form hard working artists is simply for extra file storage above free accounts.I can't wait until something far better with an artist focus comes along, and no that is not Spotify.
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Eight years today
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I know this isn't obviously startup related, but it is. Please read.
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Show HN: NomadList – The best cities to live and work remotely in
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Hi HN! I made this. Here's some info on the data before everyone goes berzerk :)Firstly, it's crowdsourced from this spreadsheet http://nomadlist.io/edit/ so it might not be 100% accurate.Secondly, NomadCost != cost of living. NomadCost is based on short-term staying in a hostel, hotel or apartment in the center, working in a coworking space and having a basic meal three times a day. That's the average digital nomad's lifestyle. They move around every few months, so they can't rent long-term. So NomadCost will be way more expensive than cost of living for a resident.I'd like to monetize this by selling city specific nomad guides on how to set up in each place and letting people find jobs remotely. Hope this helps! I think this is the future of work, so I'm very happy to help push this.P.S. this is part of my goal to launch 12 startups in 12 months (see http://levels.io/12-startups-12-months)
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The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
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Nice. I hadn't thought of there being a limit (due to vacuum) to sound intensity.Reminds me of this recent comment on reddit: http://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2h9y9g/the_first_launc..."the Saturn V rocket produced a SWL (Sound Power Level) of about 220 decibels, which is sufficient to melt concrete nearby and set grass aflame a mile away,"
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The Website That Got Me Expelled
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Some sites require JS because they do weird things like rendering stuff clientside.This site "requires" JS because... The opacity of the article is set to 0? Everything's there, everything's rendered, but they have a CSS rule (".use-motion .post { opacity: 0; }"). Only thing I can think of is that they do a JS fade-in or something and missed the unintended consequences.(Speaking of which... Doesn't Google penalize sites that have an excessive number of hidden keywords? I wonder if the entire article being hidden qualifies...)
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I ended up paying $150 for a single 60GB download from Amazon Glacier
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I'm the first one to admit that Glacier pricing is neither clear nor competetive regarding retreival fees. I do think that a lot of people use it the wrong way: as a cheap backup. I use:1. My Time Machine backup (primary backup)2. BackBlaze (secondary, offsite backup)3. Amazon Glacier (tertiary, Amazon Ireland region)I only store stuff that I can't afford to miss on Glacier: photos, family videos and some important documents. Glacier isn't my backup, it's the backup of my backup of my backup: it's my end-of-the-world-scenario backup. When my physical harddrive fails AND my backblaze account is compromised for some reason, only then will I need to retrieve files from Glacier. I chose the Ireland region so my most important files aren't even on the same physical contintent.When things get so dire that I need to retrieve stuff from Glacier, I'd be happy to pony up 150 dollars. For the rest of it, the 90 cents a month fee is just a cheap insurance.
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Craig Steven Wright claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto
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EDIT 2: Debunked!The signature in Wright's post is just pulled straight from a transaction on the blockchain. Convert the base64 signature from his post (MEUCIQDBKn1Uly8m0UyzETObUSL4wYdBfd4ejvtoQfVcNCIK4AIgZmMsXNQWHvo6KDd2Tu6euEl13VTC3ihl6XUlhcU+fM4=) to hex (3045022100c12a7d54972f26d14cb311339b5122f8c187417dde1e8efb6841f55c34220ae0022066632c5cd4161efa3a2837764eee9eb84975dd54c2de2865e9752585c53e7cce), and you get the signature found in this transaction input: https://blockchain.info/tx/828ef3b079f9c23829c56fe86e85b4a69...Note that the base64 string at the top of his post isn't a signature, just a cleartext message: " Wright, it is not the same as if I sign Craig Wright, Satoshi.\n\n".Now the only question is how he fooled Gavin. I would imagine this story will still get spread around some naive channels for a while, just like the last time Wright tried something like this.Credit goes to jouke in #bitcoin for figuring it out.-----------------EDIT: Current opinion: still skeptical. Here is the public cryptographic "proof": http://www.drcraigwright.net/jean-paul-sartre-signing-signif...Something still seems off to me, why does he go into such specific detail in verifying the signature? I would have assumed he would just let people figure out the verification themselves. But maybe I'm just skeptical because Satoshi having a public identity takes some of the magic away.As pointed out by maaku, he never revealed what message the signature is supposed to be signing.-----------------My Original Post:Everyone in this thread is already taking this as the truth. But remember that Wright has not publicly released any cryptographic proof, there is only a claim from BBC that he showed the signature to them and a few magazines.This strikes me as a little strange since originally Satoshi pretty much only interacted with the community via the bitcoin mailing list. Why did he "reveal" the proof by sending it to some magazines rather than emailing the mailing list?It really seems like the person who created Bitcoin, a trustless system based on cryptographic proof, wouldn't make everyone take his word on his identity when it could be trivially solved with one email.
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Mr Robot S02E01 easter egg
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Is this season going to have a lot of "weird" stuff going on as well?I watched the first one. I enjoyed the first few episodes, seemed like it was going to be a drama about people working in InfoSec. Definitely appreciated the relative plausibility of the hacks. Was very disappointed when it turned into a psycho-druggie-anonymous-whatever sort of thing. It went so quickly from a semi-plausible portrayal to a fetishization of [black hat] hackers.I understand how that's more appealing to a wider audience. Just saying what I'd prefer personally for my own sake.
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Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]
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One pattern that I consider "dark", but don't see in this list, is using loaded options on a dialog box. One that I often see in apps is like: Rate our app!
Those really get under my skin because the developer is clearly trying to play a psychological trick on me, but it's so brazen and obvious that it just pisses me off. And bigger companies do it too (e.g. Google).
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LiChess: Learn from your mistakes
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> I tested the new feature on my favorite opening: 1.e4 e5 2.f4!, a.k.a. the mighty King Gambit. Stockfish hates it, and asked me to review it like it was a mistake! Yet it's considered playable. Actually Carlsen played it against Arionian in 2015.Not acceptable, Mr Stockfish!Actually, the King's Gambit has been (essentially) solved: https://en.chessbase.com/post/rajlich-busting-the-king-s-gam...There is only one move that doesn't lose by force after 2. ... exf4, and that is the strange-looking 3. Be2. Does that mean this opening is a "mistake"? Well, maybe not, obviously a human wouldn't know the perfect lines, but personally I wouldn't play it :)Either way, I'll certainly be using this feature a lot. Kudos to the folks at Lichess.
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Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?
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Many of these practices are popularized by Google/Facebook/Amazon but don't make sense for a company with 100 or even 1,000 people. I try to focus on whether a practice will solve a concrete problem we're facing.Switching from Hadoop to Spark was clearly a good idea for our team, even though it required learning a new stack, but there isn't a strong reason to switch to Flink or start using Haskell.Agile makes sense when your main risk is fine-grained details of user requirements, but not when you have other substantial risks, such as making sure a statistical algorithm is accurate enough.Microservices probably reduces the asymptotic cost of scaling but add a huge constant factor.Relational databases are the right choice 95% of the time, non-relational stores require a really specific use case.TDD is good for fast feedback in some domains, but for others, manually investigating the output or putting your logic into types is better. E.g. a lot of my time comes from scaling jobs that work on 10gb of data but crash on 1tb, TDD is not that helpful here.Continuous integration mostly makes sense when you're making a lot of small changes and can reliably expect a test suite to catch issues.In short, ask the question "when is practice X useful?" instead of "is practice X a good idea?"
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How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox
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One thing I've noticed about Firefox, especially on mobile, is that transform animations are pretty janky.Does anyone know if this is being worked on? Should I submit a bug report?
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HTTPS on Your Landing Page Is Important
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Troy is way overstating the case.You want to know if the login page is NatWest?Click on the Login link and look at the browsers security bar.If it says "The Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc [GB]" and that then entity with which you do business, great.It seems as if Troy would be just fine with HTTPS rather than HTTP, but DV validated certs aren't what you want anyway with a financial institution.It seems far more likely that you care about the entity you are working with (Royal Bank of Scotland), than the domain of the referring page (personal.natwest.com).
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Amazon won't sell you a Chromecast, but they will sell a counterfeit
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Amazon has a major issue with screening against knockoffs
and counterfeits, and the severity of the issues surrounding this grows every day. For instance, my friend bought a camera that looked similar to the Arlo, but it contained a telnet backdoor. Another would ping a strange AliCloud VPS over UDP that appeared to contain data related to network configuration without any explanation or ability to be disabled, short of router firewall rules. As knockoff vendors get more clever at disguising their devices as the one's they're trying to copy, an increasing amount of less-technical users become ever-more at risk regarding their security and privacy.
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Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)
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I have an observation about scanning documents that results in good quality and smaller files, but I can't satisfactorily explain why it works. Consider these two cases:(1) Scan document at very high resolution as a JPG and then use a third-party program (like Photoshop or whatever) to re-encode the JPG at your preferred low resolution.(2) Scan document at your preferred low resolution as a JPG straight away. Don't re-encode afterward.Intuition says that the results of #1 vs #2 should be identical, or that #1 should be worse because you're doing two passes on source material. But I always get better results with case #1 (i.e., high-res scan and re-encoding afterward) regardless of the type or model of scanner, or whether the scanner does the JPG encoding on-board the device itself or through a Windows/Linux/Mac driver bundled with the scanner.My theory is that scanner manufacturers are deliberately choosing the JPG encoding profile that gets them the fastest result. They want to brag about pages per minute which is an easily measured metric. Quality of JPG encoding and file size take effort to compare, but everyone understands pages per minute.If anyone has contrary experience I'd like to hear it. I've been seeing this for years with different document scanners and flatbed scanners -- regardless of how I tweak the scanner's settings, I can always get good quality in a small file by re-encoding afterward.
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Svelte 3: Rethinking Reactivity
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I'm really impressed that the release announcement starts by explaining what Svelte is. It's a little thing, but it's appreciated.
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Massachusetts Court Blocks Warrantless Access to Real-Time Location Data
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Am I the only one surprised that this is allowed in the first place? What established practices/precedent does the state have that "it could warrantlessly get cell phone location data to find anyone, anytime, at any place as long as it was less than six hours old"?That seems like precisely the information that should require a warrant, no?
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Saving Lydia
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My son too has a unique and disabling mutation. As far as I know, he is the only person with this mutation, but there are more people with a mutation in the same region of the gene, that are affected in the same way.The problem with some mutations like this, is that they have an effect on the development of the brain from the start of the development and that fixing the gene (or better its RNA transscription) will not undo that development. The results of IQ tests seems to indicate that with my sons mutation, there is a problem with the myelination in his brain. Myeliniation is a process that starts before birth and continues into adolescent. At the moment he is quite happy and functioning well within his limits. His 'academic' IQ is rather low, but in some areas, he surpases the average person by far. He has a great sense of humor and people like him. In his case, I am really afraid what would happen if we would administer him a drug that would compensate for the genetic defect. Would he go through another fase of brain development and having to cope with all kinds of changes. Could he end up being less happy, because it would remove his ignorance about certain things. For example, at the moment he has no desire for a romantic relationship, but getting such a desire and than still not being able to satisfy it, could make him very unhappy.
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Almost one in five men admits to having no close friends, a survey has found
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As a man is pretty damn hard keeping friends after the age of 30, especially if you happen to go trough a divorce when suddenly more than half (if not more) of your friends get to “choose” the other side. Yeah, you get to ask your friends back from high-school or college out for a beer but chances are they’re also in a middle of a divorce or they’re too busy with family requirements (can’t blame them) or too stressed out because of work reasons. And then there are all those friends who have moved town or even country. All in all things are not so easy.
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IRS Tried to Hide Emails That Show Tax Industry Influence over Free File Program
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This is normal.The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. So the government, in order to try to make rules that don't suck, depend on their input when drafting the rules.This, and in combination with significant lobbying, means that given enough time the industry being regulated gets to have significant amount of control over the rules being created.Oil, airflight, cars, steel production, cable television industry, etc etc. Everything that the government tries regulate suffers the same fate to differing degrees.And when it comes to certain industries, like banking or medical industry, and handful of executives of top corporations end up rotating in and out of government. Being a VP one year, a lobbyist for a couple years, and then end up as a higher level bureaucrat on some cabinet or board somewhere.They have a phrase for it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
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Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application
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I just visited the website and have 3 suggestions:- Update the website visuals/design, they seem a bit dated- Put the download buttons on the front page to increase conversions- Make a mobile version, especially for tablets. Most tablets nowadays seem powerful enough for your software, particularly the iPad. I'm sure you've thought of this before, and I have no idea what the competition is like. However, as a home owner, I can tell you interior design apps have 0% of my mind space. They should probably have more, especially considering that, combined with sites like Wayfair, IKEA, and Overstock.com, you can have a design --> purchase pipeline which is both convenient for consumers and beneficial for you via referral revenue.Also, this isn't really a suggestion, but something I'd personally love: Machine learning interior design. AutoCAD already has ML structural design tools, and this would be simpler than that. Make it so that a consumer can enter their parameters (room layout, cost, visual style preferences) and your "artificial interior designer intelligence" generates 10 designs that the user can mix and match from. The designs would link to the cheapest seller of each piece of furniture. Alternatively, the user can manually select the main pieces of furniture, like the couch and TV console, enter their parameters, and the virtual assistant will suggest matching "in fill," things like couch pillows that people usually neglect or just purchase randomly whatever is on sale. Augmented reality viewing of the machine-generated designs would be the cherry on top and prepare you for mass market introduction of AR glasses.
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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
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Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.
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How to contact Google SRE by dropping a shell in Cloud SQL
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The /mysql/tmp/greetings.txt trick was cutebut do kids these days not know about https://linux.die.net/man/1/wall ?
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Voters overwhelmingly back community broadband in Chicago and Denver
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I know many HN commenters have a strong anti-public-service bent, but consider this angle: if the government is providing your Internet service, then your service is protected by the constitution. The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution instead of the whims of a private media company with a massive conflict of interest.
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Free and liberated e-books, carefully produced for the true book lover
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Love love love Standard Ebooks.If by some chance a maintainer reads this thread a couple requests:1) There are a lot of obscure books which is great. Also doesn’t hurt to add some of the GOATS such as the works of Plato or perhaps even the Harvard Classics2) Sorting on site is frustrating3) I would be willing to commission high quality epubs and I’m sure others would too for my own benefit and humanity. For example I can get copies of the works for Plato on Gutenberg but it merits a Standard Ebooks edition and I wouldn’t blink at donating $250 or some number toward that cause. Knowing kids across the globe would have access to high quality digital editions is worth it to me. Worth exploring setting up a program for this.
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Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
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A few years ago, I ordered the cheapest six-axis robotic arm from ebay for about $100 that came with basically no software or motor-driver boards, so I did it all from scratch with a PCA9685 board, a basic kernel driver and some very hacky scripts from user space.One day I had some friends over for a glass of wine, and wanted to show off my creation. I invited them into my "lab" and placed my wine glass down on the desk so I could type a few commands with both hands.My rudimentary software had some motion smoothing once it was up and running, but upon initialization, if the arm was significantly displaced from where it had been when it was turned off, the PWM board would instruct the motor to immediately "be" in a position that required the arm to travel clear across the desk in effectively as little time as possible.In this case, where it had been previously happened to be where my wine glass was now, and the flimsy aluminum at high speed was enough to shear the stem from the glass and explode the bulb. Luckily the wine didn't get in any sensitive electronics, but I learned a valuable lesson about the difference between messing around with hardware vs software.
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YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video
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The problem is not the content of the video, crypto or not. The problem is not that YT moderates aggressively (it doesn't do enough IMHO) or even how it moderates.The problem is that there is no serious appeals process, and no third party oversight of moderation decisions. This is true for all the big platforms.How do we fix that, IDK, but probably at the government level.
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Public Money, Public Code
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The state I lived in developed one of those covid tracking apps. I asked for the source code and was told it wasn't available and would never be. I talked to people working on other software developed for the state and they all think that software shouldn't be public.It seems crazy to me that taxpayers pay for this software but it doesn't belong to them.Knowing what I do know I gotta wonder if it's just about those developers being ashamed how bad their software is and don't want others to see it.
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Meta Quest Pro
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I'm baffled by the reaction here. I agree that productive VR work is still not ready for prime time, but most of you haven't tried any of this (let alone the new hardware) and you're already dismissing even the possibility of it becoming good in the future. Reminds me of the Dropbox thread. You know which one.Also what I really don't understand is how anyone can have anything against them spending $$$ on R&D? Worst case scenario: their whole productivity angle doesn't work out, they lose billions upon billions in the coming decade and eventually scrap the whole thing. Then they've still invented a lot of super interesting tech along the way. High resolution displays, low latency rendering pipelines, novel human interface technologies, high fidelity hand tracking, lightweight and sharp lenses, the list goes on and on. There's lots of applications for each of those things and almost nobody else is willing to spend this much cash for such an uncertain roi.
I, for one, am super excited about what the future iterations of this will look like.
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LastPass breach gets worse
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One of the most frustrating things about the LastPass leak is that they still haven't provided all the information needed to determine whether a customer is at risk.For example, it's clear backups were stolen, but they won't say how old the backups were, or what their retention policy is. So even if you changed your password to a stronger one, with more rotations, it may be that the attacker got hold of very old backups with weaker security. I've asked their support team for information about time windows of backups stolen, if they have a retention policy and whether it was adhered to, but they won't share that information. Instead we are left with a blog post that is more than a month old, no recent updates, and questions remaining unanswered. I'm a paying 'enterprise' customer, and they are meant to be ISO270001 compliant, so a retention policy should be a pretty simple thing to share.
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I’m now a full-time professional open source maintainer
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"I now have six amazing clients, and I’m making an amount of money equivalent to my Google total compensation package,[1] which proves the thesis that it’s possible to be a professional maintainer earning rates competitive with the adjacent market for senior software engineers."His experience is totally unique. Please don't let this make you think you can quit your job and earn the same you did at your high paying FANG job. He's an outlier in the industry. I was a nobody when I left my job to work on open source full time. It was a year before I found a corporate sponsor and that was only because my friend worked there and he understood the value of what I was working on. Patreon was laughable in terms of what came back. Just be fully aware as you read this. With existing brand and following you can do what he did, without it you'll struggle immensely like I did.
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Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application
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I tried hard to make Sweet Home work for me. It solves the quick and dirty use case but I really wanted something where I could measure out every dimension in the house with a laser measurer, describe the shape and the relationships between the objects and let the computer do the rest. In a program like Sweet Home, and every other floor plan program out there if you make one change (like updating the measurement of the wall thickness you have to manually and carefully move everything else around.I ended up throwing together something quick and dirty with Org Mode tables and Metapost: https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/blob/main/house.orgIt works pretty well and the output is pretty.
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CFTC sues Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao [pdf]
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There is more commentary by Molly White on Twitter, quoting various parts of the complaint:https://twitter.com/web3isgreat/status/1640373566322491393My favorite is probably the VIP feature "prompt notification of any law enforcement inquiry concerning their account". And of course there are all the text messages indicating they knew all the things they did were illegal.
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Web Environment Integrity API Proposal
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This is pretty much the inevitable end-game of the web, in no small part funded by ad-based business models (as the analog gap pretty much destroys most attempts to use this stuff to do copy protection) and enabled by developers who have insisted we shove as much difficult-to-implement functionality (by which I am talking about CSS complex stuff, not powerful-but-easy-to-code APIs for OS-level access) into the browser as possible.The result: there is now effectively one dominating web browser run by an ad company who nigh unto controls the spec for the web itself and who is finally putting its foot down to decide that we are all going to be forced to either used fully-locked down devices or to prove that we are using some locked-down component of our otherwise unlocked device to see anyone's content, and they get to frame it as fighting for the user in the spec draft as users have a "need" to prove their authenticity to websites to get their free stuff.(BTW, Brave is in the same boat: they are also an ad company--despite building ad blocking stuff themselves--and their product managers routinely discuss and even quote Brendan Eich talking about this same kind of "run the browser inside of trusted computing" as their long-term solution for preventing people blocking their ads. The vicious irony: the very tech they want to use to protect them is what will be used to protect the status quo from them! The entire premise of monetizing with ads is eventually either self-defeating or the problem itself.)
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Flappy Dird: Flappy Bird Implemented in MacOS Finder
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If you enjoy this kind of "games in places they shouldn't be" thing, here's some more very silly projects:- Fontemon: a game in a font https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html- Dungeons & Directories: a text adventure in your file browser https://wheybags.com/dungeons_and_directories/ (disclaimer: I made this one)
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Guy unknowingly live tweets the Osama raid in Abbottabad
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So the article about Osama Bin Laden being killed -- which has nearly 800 up-votes -- is being flagged off the front page, but the article about a guy who tweets about him being killed is having no problem staying #1.Then again, so many people had their comments down-voted into light gray in the original Osama article that I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of flaggings came from people that wanted to stem their own decline in karma. That would make for an interesting dataset.
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How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail
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A victory for common sense, the tech industry, and right-thinking citizens everywhere. May the gods of the market continue to smile upon Newegg (a prosperous Lunar New Year to them!).Points of interest to me:Lee Cheng: And we'll take a case through trial as a matter of principle because we want to accomplish the purpose of making good law. Like eBay did, like Quanta did when they challenged LG. It's part of our duty as a good corporate citizen to try to accelerate the rationalization of patent law.This guy talks like a crusader for just law instead of an executive or business owner. You'd pretty never hear this from anyone in a public company, it just wouldn't be possible. More's the pity that most people can't really achieve big results like this; we have to retain ownership of our businesses in order to really live out our principles.-A commenter on Ars, on why no one else fought Soverain to the end:I think the problem from most defendants' perspective is that they can just pass the costs along to their customers without facing any strategic disadvantage. Compared to its competitors, does Newegg winning this lawsuit give them any competitive advantage? After all, their competitors are no longer subject to paying for the invalidated settlements either.By paying the settlements, the companies reinforce an awful system, but they also don't need to face the volatility and potential cost of a jury-trial in districts cherry-picked by the trolls. By going to trial, the defendant only stands to maintain patent troll cost parity with their competitors (if they win and invalidate their competitors' settlements)- or they lose and get hit with a judgment that could be extremely costly.Further, in most organizations, management risks the ire of their shareholders should they elect to go to trial and lose. They're again put in a situation where their personal risks outweigh any benefits they stand to gain. Even for executives that consider themselves ethical, they can still rationalize that minimizing risk to the shareholders is the ethical decision.-This seems true enough - from a (rational) game-theoretic perspective, why should any victim really fight hard to overcome a troll, if in doing so they risk big losses, and don't gain any advantage over their competition even if they win? The main potential upside is that consumers and potential partners will view them more favorably and give them more business (as is happening now), but this is a very unreliable bet to make. The downsides of "doing the right thing" are very likely greater than the upsides.The main motivator to fight the trolls has to be personal principle, and even then the principled person has to balance it against the real risks to his company and lifestyle. Newegg had the gumption and muscle to see the case to its end, but it was the lucky one, the one-in-a-hundred with the right attributes (principled owners, private ownership, deep pockets). We're not likely to see this kind of thing happen very often, with the odds stacked against what should be the right outcome.And that's all the more reason to salute Lee Cheng, Fred Chang, and James Wu and their victory against profiteers in a flawed system. CEO Fred Chang probably deserves as many, if not more, accolades as Lee Cheng, for deciding as the major shareholder to take this battle to its end.
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Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult
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A Swiss franc is currently worth a little bit more than a dollar, so this works out to $2800/month or $33600/year. By US standards, this actually seems to be a good salary: significantly better than working full time at minimum wage.It would cover all my current expenses handily. Of course, I'm young and single but by no means frugal. (I find that the little costs involved in worrying about my expenses easily outweigh the money saved.) So this is quite an income.One of the main questions about something like this is about who would do boring, low-paid work with this sort of basic income. What I would really hope is that people would still do many of those jobs, but for far fewer hours--largely as a way to get money for incidental expenses and luxuries beyond the basic income. One problem I find with most jobs is that it's much easier to get more pay than less hours, even if I really want the latter. There is a large drop-off between full-time and part-time work.[1]Beyond a certain level, I would value having more free time far more than making more money. Unfortunately, mostly for social reasons, it's hard to express this preference. A basic income could make this much easier to do.While I suspect this might not pass, I think it would be very valuable for the entire world. One of the unfortunate realities in politics is that it is really hard to run experiments; small countries like Switzerland can act as a test subject for the entire world. Or perhaps like a tech early adopter for modern policies.Either way, this passing would be very interesting.[1]: For me, this is not quite as simple. In reality, there are plenty of jobs where I would be happy to work relatively long hours. But this stops being a question of pay, or even "work": after all, I'm happy to spend hours and hours programming for free. Being paid to do something I really like is wonderful, but it really changes the dynamics in ways that probably do not apply to most people.
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Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
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Consider this: They paid $0.00 for the transfer of $150 million dollars.A direct (i.e. not based on third party credit, regulations, etc.) transfer of wealth of this magnitude between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Depending how safely you want to make the transfer, and how far the entities are on the globe, it can cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.Bitcoin has real value. It solves problems on an incredible scale. I wish I realized this months ago.
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Introducing our smart contact lens project (for diabetics)
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Type I diabetic here. Assuming current tech stays where it is (not saying it will), this could easily tack 10 years on to my lifespan. For many who watch their diabetes less closely (something I cannot fault anyone for), this could add 20-30 years.For anyone who does not know, type I diabetes is not something you can just follow a doctor's direction on and be ok. Even if you follow your doctor perfectly, there can still be serious complications, and type I diabetics with the best control are actually more likely to die from severe low blood sugars.The reason for this is that the optimum blood glucose level is around 100. Either way, a continuous feedback mechanism would help tight control diabetics, and diabetics who do the minimum. Tight controllers could get faster feedback about when they are going into the serious danger zone without having to initiate any action (checking blood sugar), and lax diabetics would get a constant reminder of how they are letting there life slip away (which they normally would rarely see, since they hardly ever check their blood sugar anyway).I have to say though, I am still a bit skeptical for a few reasons:- One, I have been told about this sort of miracle technology ever since I was diagnosed 15 years ago.- Two, the medical complex locks down their tech and extracts the maximum value out. There is not a single glucose device on the market that lets you extract the data out of your glucose monitor and crunch the data how you want. I have worked on hacking these devices to extract data and the legal verbiage around these activities has strongly discouraged me from releasing anything. Previous continuous glucose monitoring systems. These companies would prefer you rot in the dark, than to lose one bit of profit.- Three, if one of these devices is not 100% perfect, it gets shot down and banned from the market. This is probably a combination of profit-motivated industry and caution-motivated government. A great example of this is a continuous glucose monitoring, non-invasive watch that came out ~ a decade ago. It was on the market for several years, before being banned. I, like just about every person in the thread I linked, would pay $10k+ for one of these, despite the reduced accuracy over traditional devices. Entrepreneurs in the health industry take note.[1] [http://www.diabetesdaily.com/forum/testing-blood-sugar/61908...]
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It's Time to Break Up the NSA (2014)
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I don't understand why society thinks that certain things can be contained, while certain other things cannot be.The liberals will always be telling you that the drug war is a failure, and that drug users will be able to get their hands on drugs anyway, and we should embrace that fact so we can retain some level of control, and so otherwise innocent people don't have to interact with criminals. But guns on the other hand...The conservatives will always be telling you that guns can't be controlled-- that criminals will get their hands on guns anyway and will conceal carry all the time, and that we're better off keeping them legal so we can retain some level of control, and so that innocent people don't have to be at a disadvantage to criminals. But drugs on the other hand...I take this a level further: There's no containing cryptography. The people that are on tor looking at child pornography are protected. The people that are on tor plotting terrorist activities are also protected. The only people not protected are people that don't care or don't know, and they're not the people that are worth spying on in the first place.The NSA internet data collection is perhaps the most frivolous government program in the history of the United States. We've spent god knows how much money building their Utah data center, and it will be useless as soon as the tech community starts encrypting. [1][1]: letsencrypt.org
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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
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I really liked these.This makes me feel old. I look at those desktops (particularly the Windows 95 one) and think they look clean and neat, with few distractions. I also know that they ran speedily on rubbish hardware.After ditching my BBC B (I was poor), I remember using Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 4MB RAM that someone had thrown out and installing software to take over program manager and make it look like Win95 because my machine wasn't powerful enough to run Windows 95... How a second-hand 486DX was a revelation. 16MB of RAM! Unfathomable! What could use so MUCH RAM????I also remember faffing with config.sys etc. to unload mouse drivers so I could run games that moaned about himem.sys in DOS. And telling every game that I really did have an Adlib sound card and a SoundBlaster 16. I really didn't. It was a £7.50 soundcard I bought from a boy at school (who now works at Amazon and has software patents, well done to him! He was really clever, wrote games, played piano like a pro too. Nice guy).Then the upgrades to Win95, 98 (oooh Web desktop!), installing RedHat 5.2 (no, not RHEL 5.2), reading PC Plus and any magazine that mentioned Linux in an effort to learn more (dialup was expensive), and to make my abysmal VESA graphics card run X, then running FVWM, KDE1 (looked like CDE, how reassuring), GNOME1 (it's squishy), KDE2, 3.5 (perfection, everything was configurable) then going back to GNOME2 (it was simple), then abandoning it all after GNOME3 and KDE4 (hmmm a cashew) and going to OSX. All the Linux desktops I used in tandem with Windows XP and 7 to "keep my hand in" both markets.I also dabbled with BeOS; it was really really fast. Upon examination in recent years, the development API for it was really simple too. Pity the wxWidgets wrapper for it was shut down.It's amazing what having rubbish hardware will make you investigate.How I miss Netscape, the feeling of discovering something new in computers that made you go "wow" (IE4 and DHTML), or the feeling of "this is really great and USEFUL" instead of "this is really pretty", the joy of getting X to run, or learning a new Linux command whilst stuck in the CLI, getting VNC to work, doing X-window forwarding. I miss the lack of Internet, the fact that knowledge of systems came through hard work and patience, through reading and waiting for the next month's magazine that I bought with my paper-round money. I truly am an old fart.
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Mastering Bash and Terminal
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Rather than temporarily suspend vim to use the terminal you can get vim to suspend and resume itself with the exclamation mark command. This has the benefit of not wreaking havoc on your vim session and allowing you to read data into vim by prefixing with r.For example :!ls
will execute ls and show you the result (press enter to return) :r!ls
will read the result of ls in for youMore usefully :r!sed -n5,10p that/other/file
will read lines 5-10 from that other file.However you will most often want to :!make
:!up build
:!git status
:!git commit -am "Fixed #23"
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iPhone App will not stay open - just flashes when trying to launch
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I don't know why many comments about "the customer is clearly an asshole, therefore he deserves the lock not working/the company has the legal rights to do so blah blah" are modded so high right now. Even when the customer is an asshole, that has absolutely nothing to do with a security device betraying him or not.I'm very glad that the customer is now only denied access to the app. I can see one day a company that sells the "cloud-lock" will allow any thief to get in the customer's door because they left a negative review for the product (and not bragging about their vengeance in a public forum like this Garaget company did). The fact that your lock one day will betray you, or your smoke detector won't sound, your pacemaker will pump differently or your car will make a different ethical decision because the company that sells it thinks that you're an asshole is beyond crazy.If this isn't a wake-up call to anyone who doesn't realize how dangerous this DRM (Digital Rights Myass) thing is becoming, I don't know what is. This is the can of shit that's just can't wait to hit the fan for those who trust in those cloud-based proprietary "solutions." This is exactly the kind of behavior that Stallman and the EFF warned us against and guess what, they're right again.
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How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
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I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible.Actually it's fine until it's not. Then your email doesn't work and you could be missing out on important communications. And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time. And you have to learn a tonne of crap in order to manage it... and the text files! Configuration... configuration everywhere. Obscure configuration. Configuration that has real consequences and causes spooky action at a distance. Configuration that will soon be exploited in strange ways.I was so frustrated the last time my mail server went down that I started writing an SMTP protocol handler in Haskell with the intent of writing a MTA with the goal of minimizing configuration and being secure and resistant to attacks by default. So that hopefully more people can run their own infrastructure without prematurely aging. I dunno how useful it will be to others but at least it will keep my gray hairs at bay, I hope, when it's ready for use.Until then though we need more guides like this for us poor souls who do go down this route. There are way too many out-dated guides awash in the sea of information.
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Gitea: Open source, self-hosted GitHub alternative
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devops sysadmin here. I started with gitlab about a year ago and can honestly say I wish I had taken gogs/gitea instead. The main problem for me is gitlabs utter dearth of somewhat counterproductive features. Git LFS support is almost a cruel joke in gitlab as git operations under the hood now take inexorably more ram to complete. In turn im rewarded with more traditional RCS programmers asking why git has problems with their newly requested LFS and a 40gb video file they decided to store.gitlab is also so large it requires its own chef deployment to competently install it from omnibus, and has no HA roadmap in sight unless you want to break apart its rube-goldberg structure and attempt to HA the individual components of it.Other things like Wiki, local runner CI, pages and integration with a corporate Jira ticket system seem like the excessive demands of programmers without enough skill to understand that there is tangible merit in ablating these systems into separate applications entirely and growing them as needed. gogs and gittea allow you to put the brakes on developers that just want to get the code out the door in order to study and implement competent things like competent CI, blue/green deploys, immutable infrastructure and reproduceable builds that target scalable platforms like Kubernetes instead of one-offs that just reward coders with a merciful standup and the chance to say "its done."if you use gittea for no other reason, it is also massively less resource hungry than a gitlab installation. im currently throwing 4 cores and 8 gigs of ram at my gitlab install with another 2.3tb of disk and frankly no end in sight. The gitlab rake task for backups has sent oomkiller on a rampage 3 times so far and takes forever. Large installs of 1000 users or more and you'll begin to see why gitlab might not be the best choice. with programmers, the thirst is real...nobody cares about features if the repo wont clone.
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How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions
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There was a similar story a couple months ago about the insider who rigged the lottery. I'm sorry, I don't recall the source.In any case, the ones who get caught are done in by carelessness, and over-confidence. You have to wonder how many are not getting caught if they can manage these two faults.
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Going Solo, Successfully
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> Don't charge by the hourThis is bad advice.Charging for a full week will make you lose a lot of clients. In the case of software development: The client never knows the full spec of the project and you'll have weeks were 10 hours is enough. Charging for those extra 30 hours is terrible deal for your client and he won't take it.What you should be careful about is how much you charge per hour. You may set different rates based on context like: for a full time project project you charge X, for future maintaining (which is on demand ) you charge 1.5 times X.Hourly also protects you agains scope creeping.
Charging by the week/project/milestones requires a near full specification and it's done at an agency level where you've a team. I've been working hourly and I love it. You can try to spec out any project as much as you can, in the end you can't predict scope changes and/or unexpected problems: API is broken, missed an important email, build system is failing for no obvious reason, server went down, etc, etc.You have to figure out when charging by the hour/week/month/milestones is reasonable. Just because someone is making 120K a year in San Fran, doesn't mean you've to make the same amount while freelancing. It heavily swings from client to client.
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What's Coming in Python 3.8
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I long for a language which has a basic featureset, and then "freezes", and no longer adds any more language features.You may continue working on the standard library, optimizing, etc. Just no new language features.In my opinion, someone should be able to learn all of a language in a few days, including every corner case and oddity, and then understand any code.If new language features get added over time, eventually you get to the case where there are obscure features everyone has to look up every time they use them.
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When your data doesn’t fit in memory: the basic techniques
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Unusual to have no occurrence of the word "stream" anywhere in the article... given that's the usual term for algorithms which require a constant or almost-constant space regardless of the amount of data they process.A semi-common beginning programmer's exercise is to write a program that numbers the lines in a text file. The naive solution will use O(n) space, while a bit more thought reveals that this can be done in constant (to be really precise, O(log n) where n is the number of lines in the file) space.
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New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
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The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro will be available for purchase in May for $299 (US) for the 11-inch iPad Pro and $349 (US) for the 12.9-inch iPad ProWow. This must be one hell of a keyboard..
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Six eBay executives and employees charged over alleged cyberstalking campaign
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Not even mentioning that one of those charged used to be a police captain......but what the hell is wrong with people that they take their job so seriously that they'd personally harass the people who run a newsletter that's critical of the company they work for?And that six of them would do it together?There are no lives at stake here. Nobody's curing cancer or saving democracy here, where maybe I could at least understand how somebody might take criticism as something immoral that needed to be fought against, even if I deeply disagreed with the method.But I just can't even fathom why these six people even cared enough in the first place about some newsletter criticizing them. Where are their psychological work-life boundaries? Why would they even care?This is just so beyond bizarre. It's like some kind of pathological level of psychological identification with your company. Your job is just a job, folks.
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Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper
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It hangs on "reading stories".Web app authors can be very creative, but one thing I don't like about web apps is that often their error handling is nonexistent. It's not about individual authors; behemots like Microsoft also do this in an irritating way: "Something did not work. Reload the page please" -- Is this really the best a billion dollar company can do? Well, I suppose this is still better than no error at all, which is a default error handling method for big chunk of web apps.I think (but can be wrong) that by using such a dynamic environment like JS is the culprit for lack of good error checking mechanism.Also one thought of mine for the reason why even big companies are unwilling to provide good error messages is that it's impossible to get the real reason. There may be so many moving parts that even the developer isn't able to handle it all. Which sparks a doubt in my mind if this environment is really fit enough to provide high quality software. Since it's so popular it's obvious that it has some aspects that it does right, but it seems that the web app environment could benefit from some fundamental changes.
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Show HN: 3D Book Image CSS Generator
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Really cool! I can probably add this to my personal book app to make things look a bit nicer: https://books.j11g.com/
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The Four Quadrants of Conformism
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I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but the two main ones are that1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole history of (the various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow, and confuses demonstration with affirmationand, more importantly2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The people on top are the ones that make the world move in the right direction, and the ones at the bottom are dragging us all down. (Of course, he always ends up in the best category himself.)But innovation isn't good per se. If you invent novel ways of torturing people (or animals, cf. the whole meat industry), that's not progress.If you come up with clever ways of escaping the law for your own benefit while everyone else suffers (the whole "gig economy"), that's not a net gain for society, and society is legitimate in fighting you.
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We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s
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As suggested by others the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), who are actually working on collecting and identify species has most certainly declined. In many groups of insects there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take specimens to a species-level identification.This is not to say that species richness is not declining, its to say that in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important, and why they require fixed, institutionally-based funding to actually be able to provide the services that would allow us to confidently state that data like these are because of environmental change (again, they very likely are) rather than a lack of experts in the field actually doing basic research.In other words, it is extremely rare that universities (in the US) actually hire what was once known as "alpha-taxonomists", in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) in part it is a reflection of the (I would argue "immense") short-sightedness of institutions. "We want answers to complex questions! We've neglected to give scientists time to think deeply, and research over decades to answer those questions. Oh, we see."
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EU bans Belarusian airlines from European skies
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I am surprised Hungary agreed. And Poland.The governments in those nations are not shy to touch on the freedoms of their population, and often disagree with the EU when the EU points these things out. Also Poland being directly next to Belarus will affect their relations.
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FaceTime is coming to Android and Windows via the web
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Wow. That is unexpected. I have to say that FaceTime in a browser sandbox is one of the few Apple products I would consider using. I wonder what made them take this path?I also wonder if someone could build a Matrix bridge if it is available via web, that would be fairly cool.Some questions:- Is it phone-number based IDs? Or can I pick a username or get a random ID?- Is spam going to be a problem? Previous Apple had the advantage that you had to buy a multi-hundred dollar advice to call someone. Will they need to implement new spam measures (or will you simply have to add a contact first)?
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A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years
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I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
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Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon
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I doubt anyone at Facebook is freaking out about Mastodon and setting out to censor all mention of it. It's probably just a keyword or link that tends to co-appear with other, actually rule-breaking content, and some automated system has learned to block it.Still, it does seem like the sort of thing that could get Facebook in trouble with a regulator if you squint at it.
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Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Northern Virginia (US-East-1) Region
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My company uses AWS. We had significant degradation for many of their APIs for over six hours, having a substantive impact on our business. The entire time their outage board was solid green. We were in touch with their support people and knew it was bad but were under NDA not to discuss it with anyone.Of course problems and outages are going to happen, but saying they have five nines (99.999) uptime as measured by their "green board" is meaningless. During the event they were late and reluctant to report it and its significance. My point is that they are wrongly incentivized to keep the board green at all costs.
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Did I just lose half a million dollars?
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In case you’re wondering what happened, from the thread:He sent ETH to the WETH contract, received WETH as expected.Then he wanted to do the reverse and sent WETH, but will not receive anything, because you're supposed to swap your WETH to ETH in exchanges like Uniswap, or call the "withdraw" function in the contract.For contracts that want to only work with ERC-20 tokens, you use WETH, which comes from a contract that takes 1 eth and gives you 1 WETH.A known problem with ERC-20 tokens is that transferring them to a contract that isn't made to access them is equivalent to burning them. You should almost never transfer ERC-20 to a smart contract. You instead use approve to give the smart contract permission to withdraw, then call the function you want to receive and tell it to make the withdraw (the contract will internally call transferFrom).
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MIT graduate students vote to unionize
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I'm very curious to see what the long term effects of unionizing will be in Academia. I'm hopeful and optimistic it will improve things in the long run. Yes there will be some unintended consequences but academic life is already very rough if you're not tenured.Academia likes to cast itself as a true meritocracy. If you work hard and publish good papers you'll do well. In practice it's more of a gerontocracy where senior members can single handedly destroy a young investigators career. (It happened to me and I saw it happen to several people). There is little to no recourse against this.Arguments against unionization from already tenured faculty usually sound like: "If you want to be the best in your field you have to work harder than everyone else. Forming a union won't change that fact and may even discourage students from working so hard. This might interfere with their career goals."However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low.A lot of the field agrees that something needs to change, but no one can agree exactly what needs to change or how to get there. The people with the power are the tenured professors who "won the lottery" and are out of touch with the problems they are causing. They aren't going to be the mechanism of change even though they hold all the power.
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New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
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I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements we consume?Looking back at some of the European revolutions, it doesn't seem like so much is missing to cause an urge to revolt in people. So what is different? Why do we repeatedly allow this to happen?
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Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira
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I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die, but I think you need to do a better job explaining your value prop. Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. Why would I have a better time using this than Jira, bearing in mind that I'd be giving up custom workflows and probably a lot of integrations? (No shade intended. If you can answer that concisely, put that at the top of your copy.)Also, please consider finding a native english copywriter to take a run at your writing. It's readable, but not fluent, and overly filled with jargon.
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Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch (2020)
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What sort of jobs are there these days that use assembly? Is anybody still using it directly?These are pretty non-specific, but these are area I know about already for others who may have the same question as me:1. Compiler development2. Security research (malware analysis/reverse engineering) - although not much if any writing assembly, just reading3. Kernel development - again mostly just reading assembly, not writing it. Bulk of code written in C (or potentially a very recent development, rust)4. Driver development - mostly C but some devices can involve assembly
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Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
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This feels a bit like diet clickbait..."use fewer bricks than a straight wall"**A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length.My counter would be that from a practical perspective the amount of space wasted by the wavy design seems to negate the usefulness of the design.Probably makes the lawn crew dizzy when mowing it too!
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The U.K. government is close to eroding encryption worldwide
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The UK Government repeatedly fails to understand that there are no boarders on the internet, and it'd be impossible to impose any without the kind of extreme restrictions of a totalitarian regime.Any measures without broad international cooperation will push vast number of people towards darker corners of the internet, which will not just end up completely undermining what they are trying to achieve, it will make the problems worse.Meta alone have the power to make this law a miserable failure.
People will want to use WhatsApp, the government themselves use it extensively.
If meta refuses there is very little they can do. Facebook can continue to operate without a single person on the ground in UK. It might harm their business in some ways but it's definitely doable.
The government might be able to force/convince Apple and Google to take it out their app stores in the UK but such regional restrictions are easily bypassed and WhatsApp is popular enough to make people try it. So that would then normalise the practices such as side loading / jail breaking and avoiding regional restrictions. Cyber criminals would be rubbing their hands at the opportunities this creates and I am sure the peodos and terrorists this is meant to be stopping will jump at the chance to get in on the act.
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